MLB DFS Tournament Strategy: Leverage, HRs & Optimal Picks

A short five-game Thursday main slate has a few interesting matchups for us to pick over. There is cold weather across much of the country, and run totals are not very high across the board despite mostly mid-range pitching options. This should be an interesting slate for the two-pitcher sites. Hitting the bullseye on both picks tonight will be both essential and difficult. The top stacks tool is telling us there is more to like on the bats side of things, though with several teams ranking similarly, the slate could go in a number of directions. So the question remains, where do we go for our DraftKings picks and FanDuel picks for MLB DFS lineups on Thursday?

The main slate kicks off at 7:05 p.m. ET on both sites. The Awesemo team will be here for all of it, providing updates to tools and data throughout, including the Strategy Show, which you can find on YouTube, and Live Before Lock at 4:30pm ET. Speaking of tools, if you aren’t visiting the Top Stacks Tool regularly, you’re just making your MLB DFS picks incorrectly. The Top Starters Tool is every bit as important in deciding who takes the hill for your daily fantasy baseball lineup.

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MLB DFS Tournament Strategy: Top HR Options

Home Run Ratings

Home runs are the holy grail when making MLB DFS picks. Finding the right combination of sluggers who will knock one, or better two, out of the park to drive in the teammates you stack with them is critical to winning GPPs. Identifying the likely home run hitters is trickier than just looking at the big names. Using a model of my own design, based on a blend of several predictive statistics for the batter-pitcher matchup, I will give one of the top choices from each team. However, it won’t always be the absolute top-ranked player, particularly when there is an obvious star who would be in that spot every day.

Scale: 5-10 Average; 10-20 Good; 20-25 Very Good; 25+ Great

Arizona Diamondbacks: Kole Calhoun — 8.04

Colorado Rockies: Trevor Story — 6.75

Detroit Tigers: Renato Nunez — 7.87

Kansas City Royals: Jorge Soler — 17.07

Los Angeles Dodgers: Mookie Betts — 7.35

Oakland Athletics: Sean Murphy — 11.66

Tampa Bay Rays: Brandon Lowe — 11.38

Texas Rangers: Adolis Garcia — 3.63

Toronto Blue Jays: Vladimir Guerrero Jr. — 15.39

Washington Nationals: Josh Bell — 10.46

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MLB DFS Optimal Stacks & Leverage Plays

(Quick note: if it says 1-5, it means hitters 1-2-3-4-5. Otherwise, I will specify spots)

This section will feature a few standout MLB DFS spots and teams to look at for potential plays here. Make sure to check out the ownership projections for critical updates and monitor the top stacks tool throughout the day for changes.

On the Hill

Today’s pitching pool is strangely shaped, with both sites choosing to price Julio Urias like an ace, while the pitchers around him are on entirely different salary tiers. This gives us an interesting decision point around the Dodgers starter, who ranks atop the board for both sites at this point in the afternoon, he has a good matchup against a bad Rockies team in Los Angeles.

Urias made 10 starts last season and pitched a total of 55 innings, striking out 20.1% of hitters and posting a 5.06 xFIP and a 1.15 WHIP. The season before, he had a stronger 26.1% strikeout rate with a 3.43 xFIP and a 1.08 WHIP in 79 innings split between the bullpen and his eight starts. Urias is a league-average strikeout pitcher so far in his career, with a 22.9% rate overall, but there is upside for more in the former top prospect. It is easy to forget that Urias is still just 24 years old, considering his breakout came all the way back in 2016 when he was just 19. So far this year, Urias has made two starts, putting up a six strikeout game over seven innings against this same Rockies team, at Coors Field, allowing just one run on three hits and a walk; and a second game at home against the Nationals that saw him strike out just three hitters while yielding nine hits and three earned runs in 5.2 innings.

Right now Urias is not a $10,100 pitcher, but that is where he is on DraftKings. On FanDuel he is at a somewhat more reasonable $9,600 salary, but every other option is less expensive by far. Urias projects well for Awesemo (the boss’ model and mine have a slight disagreement on his overall placement on the board, listen to the man whose name is on the site), but at the expense and public ownership projection there is not a significant upside in rostering him over less expensive similarly ranked options for probability of success.

Diamondbacks starter Merrill Kelly has not been good to start the season. Kelly has thrown 10 innings and put up a 5.29 xFIP, striking out just five of the 46 hitters he has faced. Kelly is a better pitcher than that. In 2020 he threw 31 innings, striking out 23.2% of hitters and putting up a 3.95 xFIP with a 0.99 WHIP. The year before, Kelly made 32 starts and threw 183 innings. He struck out 20.3% of hitters that season and put up a 4.51 xFIP with a 1.31 WHIP. The major improvement between the two years – if not merely a product of the short sample size – was the nearly halved walk rate that Kelly put up in 2020, and the additional strikeouts. If Kelly is able to find that form again, he could be an underrated option on tonight’s slate. He is projected to be under-owned by the public on both sites, giving him significant utility and tournament upside, though the play is unstable by nature. Kelly is facing a Nationals lineup that is flashing some power in the home run model and has a respectable top-end of the lineup, and despite a few hitters with large number strikeout rates, the Nationals rank around a league average matchup in the category. Several of their best hitters are excellent at avoiding strikeouts. Still, for just $6,500 on FanDuel and $7,100 on DraftKings, the leverage against the field on a five-game slate makes it well worth considering rostering Kelly.

Latest MLB DFS Content

OAK – 1-2-4-5-7 – Canha – Laureano – Olson – Chapman – Murphy

Parsing the top stacks board for leverage gives us a few interesting options, including both teams in this contest. Between the Tigers and the Athletics, there is simply more talent in the Athletics lineup, so they get the nod in this space despite the lower leverage score on both sites. The A’s are taking on Detroit southpaw Tarik Skubal, who had a promising debut across 32 innings in seven starts last year. Skubal put up a 27.6% strikeout rate, but walked 8.2% of hitters and rounded out to a 4.81 xFIP and 1.22 WHIP. Skubal was an extremely high-strikeout pitcher through his minor league career, posting a better than 30% rate at every stop and featuring a nasty fastball-changeup-slider mix that generates a 71st-percentile chase rate.

Over the past two seasons, Oakland’s active roster has been 11th best in baseball against lefties, with a .193 ISO. They rank 12th with just a 21.9% strikeout rate in the split, though they create runs just one percent better than average. Ultimately, this is a patient team that has power against lefties. They could do damage in a somewhat under-owned spot.

The projected lineup for Oakland includes Mark Canha who is underpriced at just $3,000 on FanDuel and $4,100 on DraftKings, making him popular across sites tonight. Canha had a strong 2019. He hit 26 home runs in 497 plate appearances, going .273/.396/.517 in the process. Last year could appear like a slump to some considering the drop to a .246 average, but Canha still got on base at a .387 clip and he created runs 27% better than the average hitter. He is an excellent option to roster with lower-owned parts of the Oakland lineup.

Outfielder Ramon Laureano is appropriately priced on FanDuel but comes in at a bit of a discount on DraftKings. Laureano is a speed and mid-range power player with a good skillset for MLB DFS. He slots into the second spot in the lineup and hits from the right-side of the plate, and gamers can forgive the ugly .213/.338/.366 slash he put up last season, looking more toward the .288/.340/.521 mark with 24 home runs and 13 stolen bases that he delivered in 2019. Laureano has a .306/.375/.500 slash in his 40 plate appearances so far this year, with one home run and a whopping eight stolen bases.

Oakland has been following Laureano in the lineup with veteran Jed Lowrie who returns from purgatory to hit third for this team. Lowrie has been a productive hitter for most of his career, and he’ll look to get back on track from an affordable MLB DFS salary point of just $2,800 on FanDuel and $3,600 on DraftKings. While he is an excellent utility man, a three-hitter Lowrie is not. He is a career .262/.336/.414 hitter with just 106 home runs in his 4,548 plate appearances. Lowrie had one standout season, coincidentally with Oakland, in 2018. He saw 680 plate appearances that year and hit a career high 23 home runs; his previous high was 16 in 2012 and he hit 14 a year prior in 2018. It is difficult to buy into a player two years removed from a breakout season that took place at age 34, though if he hits third at these prices, Lowrie will have to be a consideration in Oakland stacks.

Slugging lefty first baseman Matt Olson is undeniably better against right-handed pitching. He has a career .251/.350/.527 slash with a .276 ISO and creates runs 36% better than average against opposite hand pitching. That does not mean he is necessarily bad against fellow southpaws, however. Olson has a .230/.309/.425 slash that needs a lot of cleaning up, but the power and run production do not disappear entirely. He maintains a .195 ISO and a 101 WRC+ in the split and actually strikes out slightly less, though he walks far less in the split. Olson is playable if he is in the lineup tonight, particularly if the public strays from the cleanup hitter simply because of the same-handed matchup.

Third baseman Matt Chapman is on the correct side of his splits, though his MLB DFS ownership projection is elevated at a discounted $4,300 on DraftKings and $3,200 on FanDuel. Chapman is an All-Star caliber hitter who is underpriced after a downturn last year. He saw just 152 plate appearances and put up a .232/.276/.535 slash, which tells us the power was still there. Chapman hit 10 home runs and posted a .303 ISO in that same sample. There is significant appeal there since Chapman hit 36 home runs in 670 plate appearances in 2019.

If Mitch Moreland is in the lineup, he will be a second splits-heavy lefty to consider at a corner infield position. Moreland is known for his ability to demolish right-handed pitching; he has a career .212 ISO in the split and creates runs seven percent better than average. Unlike his teammate, Moreland suffers significantly in same-handed matchups. For his career, he has just a .133 ISO against lefties, and he creates runs 23% worse than average while striking out more and walking less. Moreland is further off the board than Olson in a same-handed matchup.

Catcher Sean Murphy has a thunderous bat when you catch him on the right day. He put up a .224 ISO in his 140 plate appearances last season, hitting seven home runs along the way. He is a former third round pick and a highly regarded prospect whose raw power has long been awaited. Turning that into true game power is the trick that Murphy is trying to turn as he develops on the fly for the Athletics. Murphy is off to a tough start in 2021, putting up just a .136/.296/.227 slash with a .091 ISO so far, though that is across only 27 plate appearances. If that keeps the box score watchers away, gamers can happily roster Murphy on the back end of stacks.

Stephen Piscotty is an option for a little pop from the right side of the plate at the end of the batting order. Piscotty has had a respectable career and flashed his upside and ability to drive the ball last season. In his 140 plate appearances, Piscotty had a .224 ISO and hit seven home runs while creating runs 31% better than average. He gets on base at a strong clip and is a prototypical Athletics hitter for just $2,500 on FanDuel and $2,400 on DraftKings.

At the very bottom of the order, Elvis Andrus could slot in for just $2,100 on the blue site and $2,900 on DraftKings. Andrus has a significant history of mid-range power and speed and should not be written off despite his advancing age and declining skills. In 2020 Andrus managed just a .194/.252/.330 slash, but he hit three home runs and stole three bases in only 111 plate appearances. The year before, he saw 648 opportunities from a prime position in the lineup, hitting 12 home runs and swiping 31 bases. There is room for DFS upside, and Andrus makes for a sneaky-interesting tournament wraparound play.

HR Call: Randal Grichuk – Blue Jays

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Author

Terry McBride

Terry used to do other things, now he writes words on the internet. He hopes his more than 20 years’ experience in season-long and daily fantasy sports and his custom models for MLB, NBA, and NFL don't steer you too wrong when he writes columns and makes picks on Awesemo.com. A lifetime of experience keeping odd hours make Terry ideal to cover KBO baseball overnight until the world returns to normal. Most of those late night hours have been spent on the couch watching sports, T.V., and movies; just try to shut him up about any of the above. You can find his pop-culture ramblings and more on Sideaction.